Multi-Backup Network Informed Policy Creation

2. The method of claim 1 wherein the backup operations each implement a policy that specifies a plurality of service requirements and that is initiated at a time within the plurality of transfer windows.

4. The method of claim 3 wherein the historical data is used to establish bandwidth data used to derive the respective bandwidth capacities of each transfer window.

5. The method of claim 3 wherein the network devices comprise out-of-band devices coupled to other network equipment devices through a network implementing out-of-band protocols, and further wherein the network devices comprise at least one of managed switches, routers, or firewall devices.

6. The method of claim 5 wherein the network comprises the out-of-band protocol network and a production software network coupling a plurality of computers together for the execution of one or more applications.

7. The method of claim 2 wherein each policy is selected from a plurality of backup policies specifying a target storage location of the destination, a recovery time objective, and a recovery point objective for data backed up under the backup policy.

8. The method of claim 3 further comprising transmitting the determined optimum time as a proposed time to transfer the dataset from the source to the destination after a snapshot backup executed by the data protection system.

9. The method of claim 3 wherein the operational parameters comprise at least one of: incoming and outgoing bandwidth for each of the source and destination, and uplink speed for the source and destination.

11. The method of claim 10 further comprising initiating a backup during a time window selected by the matching step.

12. The method of claim 11 wherein the backup comprises a plurality of stages comprising taking a snapshot copy of a respective dataset from a source, transferring the dataset to a specified destination, tiering of the dataset to cloud storage, or replicating the dataset to secondary storage.

13. The method of claim 12 further comprising initiating the backup after the snapshot copy taking step.

14. The method of claim 11 wherein the backup operations each implement a policy that specifies a plurality of service requirements and that is initiated at a time within the plurality of transfer windows.

16. The method of claim 15 wherein the historical data is used to establish bandwidth data used to derive the respective bandwidth capacities of each transfer window.

17. The method of claim 15 wherein the optimum time represents a time to initiate the backup operation that results in a shortest data transfer time over all of the transfer windows from as compared to other possible transfer windows in a defined backup period.